Spadework Specialists

TV lawyers like Mason, Hawkins and Preston routinely best prosecutors and private attorneys alike by dint of imaginative research and brilliant courtroom tactics. Without the aid of the TV scriptwriters, though, a lone practitioner or a small firm is rarely a match for a large adversary backed by a platoon of associates in the firm and a big reference library. Nor can small outfits usually afford the high annual fees electronics firms charge for use of computers that can search their prodigious memories in seconds and spew out legal precedents.

One way for the small firm to have a fighting chance, at reasonable rates, is to turn to a research company manned by lawyers. There is now a handful of these in the U.S. doing legal spadework.

The largest and most aggressive is The Research Group Inc., with offices in Cambridge, Mass., Ann Arbor, Mich., and Charlottesville, Va.--all cities with major university law libraries. The Group gears its services to smaller firms, which constitute an important market; about three-quarters of the private attorneys in the U.S. work in offices that have three lawyers or fewer.

The company will prepare basic analyses of statutes and precedents in question, draw up briefs, develop strategy or seek grounds for appeal. It claims to be competent in most legal specialties, from admiralty law to zoning. Relying solely on old-fashioned search and analysis, not computers, the Group charges its customers $17.50 an hour--a bargain compared with the average $40 that individual lawyers routinely charge for their own time. The difference can mean substantial savings for the client.

The staff that churns out this cut-rate research consists of 50 lawyers, most of them under 30, and some 150 third-year law students who work part-time.

The founder and chief is Walter W. Morrison, 29, who began organizing his enterprise in 1969 while still attending the University of Virginia Law School. During the summer he served as a clerk in a 15-man Hartford firm and occasionally came into contact with lawyers from smaller firms. "Their hours," he observed, "are eaten up by running an office and gathering the facts on a case."

All too often, he found, they were so ill prepared in court that they could not argue their cases competently. He concluded that "true legal advocacy, the bedrock of our system, is crumbling."

Strengthening the bedrock has turned out to be profitable work for Morrison, who began with a $150,000 loan and is now grossing $2 million a year.

The Group currently has some 8,000 lawyer-customers and is wooing more with an advertising campaign in legal trade journals. Because the company does not deal directly with the public, professional codes against a lawyer's advertising his services do not apply. Morrison even dreams of opening branches overseas; he already has a few clients on Guam, in Canada and Guatemala.

He keeps the clientele happy by helping them win tough cases. In one, the parents of a Missouri youth sued a liquor-store owner for selling to a minor, thus allowing him to get so drunk that he drove his car into a tree, killing two passengers and injuring himself. The case was a particular problem in Missouri. The state has no statute holding a liquor seller liable in damages for any injuries that befall a person who has been sold booze improperly. In fact, Missouri has followed the common-law tradition that it is the consumption of alcohol, not the sale, that is the legal cause of accidents. Six attorneys turned down the case as having no chance; the seventh, Elmer Oberhellmann of St. Louis, a single practitioner, tried in vain to find a precedent. Then he handed the problem over to the Group, which turned up an 1850 Missouri court opinion involving the sale of liquor to a slave without the permission of his owner. The slave got drunk, fell asleep and froze to death on a blustering whiter night; his master sued and won the price of a new slave. That led the Group to a 1972 case containing language indicating that the Missouri courts might be willing to abandon the old common-law tradition. Finally, they pulled together the recent legal developments across the country concerning a seller's liability. With that armament of precedents, they drew up a memorandum that persuaded three attorneys for the liquor dealer's insurance companies to settle out of court for $25,000.

Such rigorous digging has its drawbacks. Some attorneys argue that the Group's legal aid discourages a lawyer from keeping up with his field. As Larry Wise of Chesapeake, Va., explains, "Doing legal research is like continuing education. If you start relying only on others, you're bound to grow rusty at assembling the facts into the most forceful legal position." The solution: for a lawyer to consider legal-research outfits as just one more tool in winning a case.

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